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From: bc@cyb-eng.UUCP (Bill Crews)
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: Need strnlen().
Message-ID: <786@cyb-eng.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-Nov-85 09:02:41 EST
Article-I.D.: cyb-eng.786
Posted: Wed Nov 20 09:02:41 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Nov-85 01:48:05 EST
References: <207@a.sei.cmu.edu>
Organization: Cyb Systems, Austin, TX
Lines: 20

> One should never allow a character array to not have a null terminating byte.
> Doing things like this should be automatic.  Besides, usually when the program
> dumps core, one usually can find the problem readily.  Also, if I am not
> mistaken, having character arrays that do not have terminating null bytes
> will cause problems with many other funtions e.g printf().  printf() (or
> maybe _doprint() I'm not sure which) will keep printing characters until they
> hit that null byte, but they probably won't find it where it should be.
> Unless I'm wrong, making sure strings are null terminated should be as
> automatic as making sure that you aren't trying to use NULL pointers or
> that malloc() returns a valid pointer.

It should be obvious that one is sometimes governed by external
constraints, such as the format of a directory entry.  If a file or
directory entry format contains a fixed-length field which contains
textual data that can fill the entire field, one must deal with it
somehow.
-- 
	- bc -

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